As economic crises, declines and dislocations increasingly hurt or threaten people around the globe, they provoke questions. How are we to understand the forces that produced the 2008 crisis, the crisis itself, with its quick bailouts and stimulus programs, and now the debts, austerity policies and deepening economic inequalities that do not go away? Economies this troubled force people to think and react. Some resign themselves to "hard times" as if they were natural events. Some pursue individual strategies trying to escape the troubles. Some mobilize to fight whoever they blame for it all. Many are drawn to scapegoating, usually encouraged by politicians and parties seeking electoral advantages.

This episode of Economic Update features a look into the car parts industry, why and how German courts cut Uber, how Russia's economy is growing despite economic sanctions, why there’s no recovery in declining teaching positions in the US for new PhDs...

In this episode of Economic Update we take a look at the Trans-Pacific Partnership secrets, the Heinz-Kraft merger, the overly costly and underperforming US medical care system, the fines for Graco selling faulty child car-seats, China's real-estate bubble and the estate tax repeal being pushed by Republican House Representatives. We will also hear responses to listeners on property: private versus public and discuss how system change has happened in the past and and how it can and should happen within capitalism today.

Thousands of years ago, various religions developed an idea some called “jubilee.” It entailed the acts of canceling or reversing income and/or wealth inequalities (especially of land holdings and debts) that had developed in their societies. Often, jubilees were stipulated to occur periodically every 49 years, more or less. The point was not to change the socio-economic system; it was rather to redistribute property and then restart the same system again as a way to preserve it. Variations of the jubilee idea have survived and occasionally surfaced into public discourse ever since.